Archives: October 2026

When someone dies because of another person's carelessness, the family is left with grief first and legal questions much later. One of those questions catches many families off guard: who in the family actually has the right to hold the responsible person accountable? California answers that with a statute, not with how close you were to the person who died. The right to bring a wrongful death lawsuit in California belongs to a specific list of people in Code of Civil Procedure section 377.60, and that list is built largely on the state's inheritance rules. The results can feel arbitrary. [...]